Dopey and Grumpy

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ON TELEVISION reviewing "Ed" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm". . . At the beginning of the first episode, Ed Stevens (Tom Cavanagh), ...gets fired for misplacing a comma in a five-hundred-page contract—an error that costs his firm $1.6 million—and comes home from the office to find his wife in bed with the mailman... At loose ends, he flees to his home town, Stuckeyville, where two momentous things happen: he runs into Carol (Julie Bowen), a woman he had a crush on back at Stuckeyville High, who is now a teacher there herself, and she gives him a life-changing kiss that inspires him to buy the local bowling alley and move back to Stuckeyville for good. High school, and the past in general, looms large in "Ed"; the show is a fantasia on recapturing the lost years and the kind of small-town life that Rob Burnett, an executive producer of "Late Show with David Letterman," had when he was growing up in suburban New Jersey. . . When Dave’s dumb, we relish it, but when "Ed" ’s dumb, we feel as if we were being served all the baloney we can eat. . . The character that the comedy writer and "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David plays in his new HBO series, "Curb Your Enthusiasm"—himself—is a psychic accident intent on happening, a speck of grit looking for an eye to lodge in. No good deed that he performs for another human being goes unpunished, and neither do any of his more numerous bad deeds. If David wrote the show’s scripts, he could be considered the Bard of Bad Karma. But there are no scripts, and he functions instead as a cloud seeder creating black-comedy downpours; he writes the story outlines for the show, then he and his cast, which includes Cheryl Hines... and Jeff Garlin... improvise the whole half hour of this uncomfortable, almost unbelievably funny show...